Izabela Ciesinska is a Toronto-based children's book illustrator. She is also a screenwriter and assistant director with numerous television credits and a feature film to her name. She is in charge of programming at this year's Fantasy World Wide Film Festival, scheduled to screen in October of 2006.

When I was growing up my mother constantly reminded me that “the path to God is not easy” but as the child of an atheist father and—to my mind—an overly devout mother it was advice I ignored because I had no interest in finding a path to God.
My pragmatic father negated any possibility of a Godly existence within our world, and managed to shrink Jesus down to nothing more than a historically accurate character (he had been a history professor in Poland before we moved to Canada). My mother on the other hand, tried to save me from my father’s uninspiring certainty of realism by bombarding me with parables and tales of realms of divine existence. I chose to believe neither of them.
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